The banana-spikey-haired kid dashed through the maze of cracked
mirrors, flicking his head around corners like an accordian-necked
roadrunner turned predator who'd resolved to near-fatally wound the
coyotee as many times as he'd failed to squish him. The
squirtgun-shaped tekica laser gun continuously missed it's targets by
the scant margines of an expert sniper just barely off his game due to
a slight spiked-punch hangover of 700 proof voka a few nights
before. He thrust aside the sliver of protofon in his brain
reminding him he was toast if he suffered a direct hit to his head,
chest, back, or groin, and took wild risks like the daredevil he was
born to be, laughing in the face of potential demise in the lunatic
vendetta he was after, all the way up to his de-rezzing about a minute
and forty-three seconds into the game: a death about seventy-three
seconds away.
He shot at a spiked death orb minding its own business, which wasn't
quite illegal but was generally a dumb idea, and cursed when it blinked
the two feet to hover point-blank from his face. He birthed a
drop of sweat and prayed the orb was too busy to bother with the
half-second task of vaporizing him, and twitched in confusion when his
hopes were realized. "Idiot," it buzz-lisped, and blinked back to
its terminal where it was busy downloading dirty images of
porcupine-cantelopes to hang on the newly painted walls of his favorite
frat house, of which he remained a member even though his grades in
Algebra and Ancient Temporal Nanology 401 were steadily dropping.
Although, the situation had the upside of acing Mixed Voka Permutations
609 for the third time his sophmore year. The
plusing, crackling blue-yellow energy bullet of a superior zz-77 pea
shooter fwupped by him, then another, then exactly 75 more, all within
the span of 77 zizits, which was the entire point of the zz-77 pea
shooter. Its obvious downside was that 77% of the time, all
seventy-seven energy bullets missed their mark. Since the shooter
was well out of sight, and he was blinded temporarily by the bright
burst of the weapon solely out of a placebo affect from someone once
telling him that it had this affect (magnified by Tiz's idea that even
if it wasn't true, then if he was worried about it enough, the worry
actually corporealized the paranoia into a tangible reality), and the
nearest cover of a small fern was too far away to reach by the time the
gun would charge up again, he did what he always did in this situation,
and tapped the tiny prototype device that Koby had invented that
flashed the niftiest looking 7-D fractaly lights anyone who saw them
had ever seen, which had the side effect of freezing the entire
space-time continuum within a radius of forty kilomilas. As Tiz
was horifically forgetful and this was only the third time he'd used
the device, he still hadn't learned the lesson that the prototype also
had the unfortunate downside of freezing the person who activated
it. His last thought before jolting into his third cryogenic
freeze of the week, was that he really should have just left the device
at home with Koby.

Koby was a dexterous egg-shaped lump of
black-spotted pink-orange clay with stubby arms and feet and
trading-card shaped ears, whose coloring was so similar to actual
trading cards that he once took a nap at a Xorich competition which he
often did at totally random places, where someone had almost yanked off
his ear when his friend wasn't looking, having mistaking Koby for the
discard pile. It was so strange a mix-up that for a moment the
boy thought the game had come to life and he'd inadvertanly summoned
the 3/7 pumpkin-efk that he'd previously discarded.
Koby was born as dense as a smart german sheppard but his IQ had
tripled so many times during a series of freak disfunctional x-non
scans that he could immediately develop systems of math bafflingly
above calculus, relativity, and the ridiculous nonsense mathematical
system of the ancient Old Old Earth movie "Cube." He was so smart
that he once scribbled out the blueprints for a superior x-non machine
on the back of a napkin, which when he tested in an begram orb,
malfunctioned in a likewise similar but magnified way. The
malfunction of the core flutons was caused by a rare isomorphic
aligning of the tiny flutons with a far off clique of tiny spinning
balls circling a huge glowing orb called the sun by those on one of the
tiny spheres circling it, a pattern of matter than he quickly deduced
must exist somewhere outisde of the fluton pattern of the x-non device
in some corner of the known universe that he immediately named Thworn.
He hadn't, however--and probably never would--publish his blueprints,
as he had never even shared any of his deep philosophiscientificky
thoughts with anyone in the world other than an odd ghostly voice that
poked in his head now and again he'd named "Todd," whom he figured was
some bored turbotoy in a nearby dimension who's primary abilities
including mind surfing and invading and annoying other people's privacy
for his own personal entertainment. Apart from Todd, he could
never tell anyone his ideas, because it would run the risk of being
locked up and experimented on until he developed the ability--in this
case--to move whole plethoras of such tiny flutons or planets, with his
mind alone--a situation so significant that the local animal protection
group would be extremely challenged to go up against the experimenting
scientists on his behalf. Especially if they found out he was the
one who let the ferrerets in with the wounded tigegur before he
re-realized they couldn't telepeport on Sunderdays.
For the entire first year of Koby's new heightened awareness, he was
terribly afraid of an event referred to on Old Old Earth as a
Flowers-For-Algernon frwoa twist--which would again leave him dense
as the lazily-rolled playdough glob his body and slight pot belly
emulated--for the sake of frwoa plot symmetry of anyone anywhere
following along with his life like a bad manga novel. Finally he
simply figured some things were good enough to last, and that some
tales had happy endings and weren't limited to the redundancy of the
foci of two predictable cliche plot points. Perhaps he was just
lucky and someone was reading the already backwards manga, backwards,
confusing the reader to the point where they weren't sure whether
anything bad was supposed to happen to Koby in the story. The
reader must have got bored and flipped to another page, because Koby's
work was suddenly interrupted by a fractaly beeping light-noise on
Tiz's desk that he was now thrice familiar with. He frowned and
sighed as loudly as his lumpy lungs would allow him to, cursed himself
for underestimating Tiz's idiocy and not locking up the fractal ray the
moment doing so occured to him the first time, cursed his own idiocy at
this thought, and began his tedious bouncy wobble toward the lazer tag
entry gate begram. This was gonna take awhile. But there
was always lots to do in the head of an enlightened supergenius ball of
animated pink-orange playdough.

* * *

Somewhere
vaguely within the ballpark of being in the area, two boarding punks
named Zipper and Punk zipped back and forth on the plaid
half-pipe. There was only one other person there: a slightly
drunk elderly man who kept falling off his skateboard, who had either
lost his skill in his old age or was trying to teach himself a new
trick. Each time he fell he let out a slow groan and touched his
hand to his back or his hip. The half-pipe was big enough for the
two moderately skilled others to board around him. Zipper spoke
up. "So, you finally broke in your static,
ethicless 'gram, eh?" 'Gram' was skater boy slang for 'begram,'
which was a thing similar to Earth's computer "programs."
Kruffonulania was a realm not too far removed from Earth and hence had
a similar language to English--if a different dialect. The term
"program" had been instead been coined "begginergram," which was halved
by the constant use to "begram," and halved again to a single syllable
supposedly by Punk himself, a term Punk claimed he had coined and let
ripple out among compsci skater kids and then everyone else (He also
claimed that Kroffonian skateboarders had to board in full pipes until
his great-great-grandfather suggested sawing them in half; and before
that, lead boxes). Of course, no one knew how far
the term spread, because no one knew how large Kroffonulania was.
The land appeared totally flat, and it was supposed the ground and sky
were either flat and infinite (or maybe a sphere of infinite radius),
or limited and round; some huge ball of rock and dirt too large to
confirm. Some pondered that Kroffonulania was just their version
of all existence, all possible worlds contained within it if you just
traveled far enough, even bigger than Earth's "known universe" of many
galaxies, but instead of space-time bending around the foci of
spherical rocks and balls of gas, Kroffonulania bent around a flat
world supporting everything. From a Kroffonulanian frangle,
planets could be massive constructed objects floating far above the
flat ground, or a tank of tiny marbles with microscopic life.
"Spider's gonna freaking trash Kyle." Punk had the short,
always-spiked hair that got him his nickname that re-colored itself
about once an hour, a few ear and nose piercings whose metal morphed
between copper, platinum, and adamanthium, and had a thin nickel spike
driven right through his skull, an organ on Kroffonulania sort of like
an extra thought-liver that didn't have much use. Zipper in
contrast was clearly more clean cut. He had recently started
wearing the denim of twenty-first century Old Old Earth given a bizarre
fetish for the period--earning him his recently attained nickname, and
a shirt currently in style that looked like swirling grapefruit juice.
"I'll bet yah eighty squeezes of aspercreme I can get Kyle to off
himself in a month. And Spider isn't static. He's
dynamic." In Kroffonulania, all but a few chemists had perished
at a giant convention inconveniently held in a nuclear testing site,
which had a bomb testing overbooked on the same day, by the mistake of
an overworked and underpaid secretary. Hence, the aspercreme
ingredients sucrose, calcium carbonate, corn starch, talc, mineral oil,
natural and artificial flavors, adipic acid, sodium polyphosphate, and
yellow 6, were mostly hard to come by, and aspercreme had become one of
the primary currencies of the planet. What wasn't
noticed was the last known ingredients they thought made up aspercreme
were instead the ingredients of Tums, by the mistake of the same
underpaid secretary--incidentally (and coincidentally) with the same
name as the Springfield High secretary who had misordered the college
calculus book--Alice--who had become fed up at the dangers of
radioactive testing by the time she had grown her fifth eyeball and
switched jobs, which was ironic since she eventually died of calcium
overdose, having consumed the Tums excessively as if candy. The
reason the error, incidentally--and coincidentally--wasn't noticed, was
that all the supposed warehouses for the last remaining supplies of
sucrose, calcium carbonate, corn starch, talc, mineral oil, natural and
artifical flavors, adipic acid, sodium polyphosphate, and yellow 6,
were all mislabeled by Alice's ex-husband, and were actually the
respective aspercreme ingredients (except the warehouse for yellow 6
which contained a supply of yellow 4). "You're on. He's gonna be a friggin' savior by the time the game's finished."
"Saviors get crucified... Anyway, the game's never
finished." The game was like a very very very very very advanced
version of the Simms, played on the Kroffonian equivalent of computers,
which were strange glowing orbs of data and running begrams.
Kroffania had an odd mix of what Earthers might consider technology,
and magic (a word called "moka" in Kroffonia just for the reason to
feign the mild creativity of slight revision of linguistic
dialects). These orb servers in particular were exponentially
more advanced than Earth's computers, so much so that the entire
operating system of many of the relevant Earth-computers in the game
were fully contained within the encompassing begrams, as were
everyone's brains and everything else. Other Earth computers,
such as laptops in local Starbucks' and the CVS centralized
prescription data, were just roughly approximated. When one of
these was accessed by a relevant Earth-world character, the program
would allocate space and program much of its hard drive for temporary
use, simulating the PC's processor. Hence when one looked up a
drug like viagro-oxy-continent-rilititalin at Walgreens, the system
took more time to configure its chemical formulae, consider the
person's addictive tendencies, and decide whether there was any in
stock. The game ran 24/7 (or rather 34/8 in
Kroffonulania) in real time and the players checked in regularly by
remote devices like a laptop connecting to an internet server.
The main variables and sub-begrams that were manipulated were the
people and the environments surrounding the main character. Part
of the game was altering things like school curriculum, gas prices,
religion of parents, or whether friends or siblings prefer BBQ fritos
or original. One might find a way to give a player's dog cancer,
or introduce some transfer student to try to seduce him, who could turn
out to be a nice next-door girl or an alien slut from another planet.
"Kyle, Kyle, doomed and vile..." Punk attempted a high 180 and
fell hard, slamming his head. Oddly enough, at the same moment,
the old man successfully achieved the same maneuver. Punk yelled
out in pain. "I told you to wear a goddamn helmet. You're gonna goddamn kill yourself."
"Just more practice to get Kyle to do the same." At this, Zipper
zipped right by Punk--who was getting up--knocking him back down.
Punk yelled. "Hey! Don't take your anger that your cyberpet
is a suicidal disfunct out on me. Just be happy he's unlikely to
be homicidal." "He's neither."
"Not a danger to himself or others, huh?" Punk got back on his
board. "Anyway, my dad says they rig the Kyle Kirby Earth program
to lean towards your dorky ethical scenarios, so as not to be a nasty
influence to us if he goes nuts and offs the planet. A
schizophrenic genius can do that stuff, you know." "Fahh; you're just setting up an excuse to blame when I win. You're just jealous I won the last game."
"The simulation was flawed. My group of monk demonists would
never have been converted to by your over-holy Confucianist vulcans'
bullcrap logic." It was a reference to the aspects Kyle's culture
that had been involved in their last Earth game. All the cultures
and history and sciences of Earth were entirely fabricated by the
corporations producing the Earth orbs, with extension packs like diving
into the details of karaoke engineering for a character who wants to go
into the business. "Elf. He was an elf, you
idiot. His ancient magic and wisdom were quite realistic enough
to debunk your punk monk hunks' theories. You're just making your
lame excuses. I never do that when I lose." "Nah, you just boast when you win." "I'm humble, I never boast," Zipper boasted.
The old man had fallen again, and seemed in more pain this time; he
didn't even get up. Instead he grasped at his chest, apparently
having a heart attack. Zipper and Punk were too distracted by
their argument to notice. "That's 'cuz your
excessive winning is boasting enough. And like I said, it's all
rigged toward the ethics of a non-pedophile priest. Anyway my
monks were just in good physical shape, they weren't hunks. How
could they be hunks if there were no whores around." The old man
wheezed then fell to the ground, motionless. "Holy crap!"
Punk yelled. Zipper yanked out his cell phone which was about the
size of a quarter gram of valium (a drug that was always in stock in
the Earth CVS's) and called for an ambulance. In the boarding
dome, most everything was run by skateboarders, so soon two paramedics
zizzed down together on hover boards, with emergency kit
backpacks. They examined the old man, determined he wasn't dead,
and slapped a small raisin-sized sticky-thing on his shoulder which
teleported him to the nearest hospital in a flash of silky, milky waves
of liquidated store-brand Irish Spring soap.

* * *

Now that Tiz was safe, Koby levitated the four feet to be level with
Tiz's chest and forced himself to tolerate the severe migraine that
came with focusing every flutofon of his being into charging up the
one-foot teleport blink turbo boost that would crack Tiz's rib bones
like a log battering ram to a castle drawbridge. Tiz knew the
aura's color by heart now even with perepheal vision and had no need to
look up from his slab. "I'm the only one who
knows how to materialize that flarn you're so fond of." The
deathly sparkly aura diminished by half and Koby welcomed the immediate
aspirin-like effect on his dizzying headache.
"And if you turn into a stray they'll probably catch you in a week and
dump you with the dogos or buffakolo or something, 'cause god knows
where the hell else to put a freak accident like you." The aura
diminished by half again and lost most of its sparkle. When he
performed this maneuver Koby often wondered about the liquid stimulant
additive Half & Half that as with everything he deduced must exist
somewhere, and always spent a moment at this point wondering whether
his new talent was the milk or the cream half. This reminded him
of the calculations always in the back of his mind for the perfect
ratio of mango, kiwi, and voka comprising a shot of mokigo which he'd
never even tasted but somehow knew would be his favorite liquid drink.
"And if you're really unlucky, they'll have a shrink designate you
smart enough to stand trial, find my notes on your body being made of
88% water, and teleport your molecules a mile under the desert for
first degree murder." Half again. "The double-half paradox
only applies in math, not to an imperfect dolt lacking the ability to
control his unmastered electrostatic build up to infinite
precision." Koby struggled to slice off a bit more of the
wigglingly energetic aura, but each second of the futile attempt
tripled the migraine which threatened to scramble his brain, and
finally he relented. "You no fun." Koby had
long mastered the complexities of Kroffonian grammar, but he took the
advice of some odd instinct that said continuing to fake the
pseudoretardation of a dumb turbopet might have its uses someday.
More importantly, he liked Tiz too much to reveal he now dwarfed his
smarts. He eased most of the guilt of the constant lie with the
following logic. If Tiz was flirting with a hot girl, and unknown
to him a mile away his twin was flirting with a clone of the same girl,
and one girl was an federal spy sent forward in time from a billenia
old government to study and eventually disect him, and the other one
was simply the normal ditzy type that Tiz usually dated or at least
attempted to date, neither Tiz would know the true situation until it
was revealed. So until then, what was the difference between a
pseudoretarded dumb turbopet, and someone feigning the aura of a
pseudoretarded dumb turbopet? As with most of his
deep thoughts, this branched into logic that elsewhere might have
become a full graduate philosophy thesis: If life was a single
perception of an undetailed feeling, a piece of art interpretable a
thousand ways--about one for every word that it's worth--or an
entervid, which was just digital entertainment code converted by a
begram to an image, code that could have been pecked bit by bit by a
winged datapecker, or recorded from someone's bizarre wet dreams, then
you never really had any freaking clue what the hell was going on
anywhere, so life is really about whatever the hell you decide life is
about. This Tiz had the exact same brain patterns of an identical
Tiz in the next room interacting with a dumb Koby, or a begrammed Koby,
or a hallucinated Koby while wasted or high. What the hell was
the difference? Koby re-re-concluded this for the last final time
which quenched his guilt that any x-non scanner designed with an option
to detect human decency would come up "Abysmal friend &
Pseudoretarded ethical TOA." As usual, Koby
shrugged off the remaining guilt with the honed thought-skill of
shrugging off anything he didn't like thinking about, which led him to
thinking about how to revise and improve the skill instead. This
occupied him for quite a bit, made no less easy by the replacement of
the faint lingering guilt, with the piercing mind splinter that the
last few images of any manga book he might be being read in, would
confuse the reader with as much fractal recursive paradox as he had
thought he confused himself with just now, if he indeed did.

* * *

At
home, Zipper sped up the stairs to his room, flipped onto his bed, and
pulled down Aristotle's Metaphysics from his bookshelf, a printed
version from Earth's fabricated history that he'd ordered at the cost
of three weeks allowance of aspercreme, as books were expensive.
This version's cover was Socrates as the lead singer of a rock band at
an unpopulated club with the handful of fans booing and throwing
tomatoes and turnips on the stage, denoting "non-musical Socrates."
Zipper had recently introduced a character named Pico to the Kyle Kirby
begram--a voice inside Kyle's head quite like Todd in Koby's--that he
and Punk had been playing for years, and was hence mostly his to
program, like owning major stock in a company, which could always be
bought out through various means by Punk. He thought it would be
interesting to mix some of Kroffonia's 303rd century philosophy with
the current general philosophy of Kyle's society. He often
wondered how history would proceed if certain ideas or technologies
were introduced earlier or later; like giving homosapians nuclear
weapons. Punk had tried that once in a simulation and Zipper was
still laughing at the results. He had seen strong
parallels of Aristotle's ideas to the math and symmetric physics of
fractologic, the idea that everything was sustained via perfect
symmetric opposites; a puppy for every pit-bull, and so on (he often
noted that his relationship with Punk thrived on some of these kinds of
opposition). The book had influenced Pico's recent quick math
lesson to Kyle, fusing the higher dimensional theories of both systems,
and Zipper was examining the book in more detail to find more ways to
further blend the two. He flipped to a random page and read out
loud. " 'If for each thing there is one direct
contrary, one might raise the question how the equal can be the
opposite of both the greater and the less...' " This sparked
Zipper to consider adding more puppy-pit-bull elements to Kyle's math
cocktail. He flicked on his pentagon and entered
a few settings which selected a camera in Kyle's room. Kyle's
morning alarm was going off, and he estimated Kyle had hit the snooze
button twice by now. He clicked the pentagon off and just stared
for awhile at a corner of his room, where he often imagined there was a
camera watching him inside a bigger game in which the entire Kirby land
was just a tiny side function called ZippersKirbyGame(). He was
suddenly sad at the idea that his whole life was some twenty-minute
begram run on the laptop of some respectively godly beatnik sipping
expresso at Starbucks. At this thought, more than ever before, he
felt a little more for Kyle, real or not, and just before falling into
a nap, committed just a tad more to helping him out, oblivious to the
fact that eventually doing so would require the help of a small
hyperintelligent blob of manga-dough.

Punk in contrast was
getting puke-sick of the game. Upon getting home he ignored his
mother's greeting, her further voiced complaint that he had ignored her
greeting, and her usual speech about how it was especially rude to
ignore this second comment, and whistled to Spike instead. Spike
was a deep-black pit-bull with small pointed bone fragments sticking
out of his head and wolf-life teeth. Punk had helped engineer
him, bending the dog's uncanny loyalty to himself. Most everyone
else stayed outside a good radius. "Come on,
Fuzzy." Spike--who was lying on his favorite striped rug--stood
his ears up. His intelligence surpassed an Earth dog's, yet
wasn't quite smart enough to grasp Punk's occasional verbal
irony. He watched Punk walk out the back yard door then ran after
him. Outside, Punk grabbed a two-by-two rubix
cube hanging around that was about the size of a basketball, and tossed
it to Spike. He had introduced both Spike and Kyle both to the
rubix cube when Kyle was thirteen. Spike's was designed to turn
when the dog nudged one of the sides in a certain direction.
Kyle's was designed to turn like every single other rubix cube of Old
Old Earth. He gave an odd lingering wonder as to which one would
solve theirs first, if either. "Look at me, comparing things to a
fictional homosapian cyber race. I've been playing this stupid
game too much." He left Spike uselessly trying to calculate the
algorithms to solve the cube, and flopped into a hammock.
He thought back to his conversation with Zipper--a quite usual and
boring one--despite trying not to bother thinking about the game, but
his mind soon wandered to the giraffahole. The plot turn was a
little unexpected, and he hadn't read much about it in the manuals;
they fell short in the details of schizo teenage epiphanies. Punk
figured it had a lot to do with Zipper's Pico program, and mentally
made a note to begin his hostile takeover of the thing.
Punk pulled out a thin, rectangular viewer, and clicked on the spy cam
he had secretly installed in the corner of Zipper's bedroom.
Zipper was napping, and Punk was glad it wasn't something he hated
clicking in on. Punk pressed a button on the viewer which
enlarged itself into a screen and holographic keyboard. He
checked in on Kyle via a game that Zipper had written for him which
altered Zipper's brain to believe he was controlling Kyle, when in fact
he was just watching what Kyle was up to. When he was done, he
loaded a very similar game, which might be vaguely manifested in text
in something like the following version of an old ASCII text game.

>run Koby_x-non2_self-destructWelcome
to the core of the vast VGER-like internal virtual programming of the
device known as Koby's Death Scan. Please enter sixteen digit
code to self-destruct Koby's device and collapse all nearby orbs, all
galactic frwoas, and the other 99% of existence, into the big crunch at
the end of the 877 billenia progression of the only known universe
anyone has ever known known as Okuaka. An incorrect code will
result in the sudden end of any frwoa chapter anyone might be following
your story along in.>****************>Sorry. Try again.>****************Nope.>****************Still cold.>****************Off by one letter, damn!>Really?No.>****************I think four tries is enough for today, Punk.>Go fuck a duck, Crayon.That's not nice, Punk!>NO_CARRIER